


when we clear out all the elephants

by strigiformes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Deaf Clint Barton, Friendship, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-02-27 09:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18736585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strigiformes/pseuds/strigiformes
Summary: Like how when you’re friends with people who don’t possess normal human powers or social skills, they just barge their way into said apartment. “I’m on sabbatical.”“I thought you were going on vacation to discover yourself?”“I found myself. He was pretty boring.” Wanda raises an eyebrow as she looks at him, the perfect put together image of moody millennial and modern witch. “Did you know that a flock of flamingos is called a flamboyance?”“No, I did not. I was fine without knowing it also.”Short stories of how the various Avengers deal with Clint Barton's general idiocy and his inability to own up to anything he's done. Tags will be added as I go along.





	1. natasha

**Author's Note:**

> I'm in significant Endgame denial and this is how I cope with AUs that involve zero dead characters, deaf Clint Barton and characters who are all, for the most part, friends. This is literally for my own enjoyment and no one else looks over and edits these. The title is from the Watsky song "Sloppy Seconds" which is one of the most Clint Barton songs I've ever heard.
> 
> Also I am not hearing impaired, I try to do my research and not offend anyone! Sorry in advance if I do and please let me know how to do better!

_ Are you listening to me? _

Clint looks up from Natasha’s hands to see her face, impossible to read as always and he shakes his head. Sure, he’d been vaguely watching her hands but mostly he’d been focused on the cut she’d somehow got on her left pinky and when they were going to put the next season of The Great British Baking Show on Netflix and if Tony had finally finished those boomerang arrows that he’d requested a year and a half ago.

_ Sorry. _ He signs quickly, hand going up to run through his hair before he sees rather than hear her sigh.  _ Distracted _ .

She never asks him to put his hearing aids in but it doesn’t stop her from rolling her eyes and moving forward to smack him upside the head. She’s pulling out her phone and Clint is already far from interested because usually this means there is about to be some form of angry text from some handler. Then he remembers they don’t have handlers anymore, their independence more than Clint can process on most day and relishes in on the others, but instead she’s pulling up YouTube and scrolling through trending until she pulls up a video titled “ **Avengers VS the MAFIA??? [original]** ” with a picture of his own dumb face as the thumbnail and Clint can’t stop himself from wincing. There’s a half a million views and it looks like it’s climbing, much to his own internal screaming. The title makes it sound both cooler and more intense than the situation actually was but sure enough he can see little pixelated him on the screen and an imposing figure in a tracksuit trying to look intimidating in front of him. 

“It should be Avenger, like, singular.” He finds himself saying before he can stop his own mouth and she looks even less happy with that. He wondered how she was the one to get stuck with this job. “And one guy does not make an entire… mafia. I didn’t fight the whole mafia. Is there a singular for mafia?”

_ You’re an idiot.  _ She signs after letting him hold the phone and watch the forty two second clip of him almost getting shot and proceeding to knock out the other man. At least he didn’t kill him, that would have been really hard to explain to the general populace.  _ Steve is going to be pissed. _

He shrugs, because when isn’t  _ someone _ mad at him, then clicks the play button to watch the video again and groans as he watches the other guy get slammed to the ground. “I can just pretend I can’t understand him.” He’s fairly certain she’s signing something else as he can see the motions out of the corner of his eye but he refuses to look over, instead choosing to scroll down through the comments. “Look, there’s even a debate if I’m actually an Avenger at all. This guy thinks I’m just a really dedicated cosplayer.”

He’s reluctant to look up because he knows there’s going to be a glare in his direction but not looking means his options for an actual conversation with his best friend are severely limited. It’s a catch-22 and one that he’s not particularly interested in. In the end looking up wins and when he does he catches the Natasha that not everyone else gets, her arms crossed but her eyes sympathetic. Which means she knows more than she’s saying and leads to her tugging him in close, tugging his head into the crook her neck. He couldn’t hear anything she was saying but there was a hum of noise that he just couldn’t pick up, her hand smoothing over his back as he sighed. 

“Aw, Nat, no.”

She raps her knuckles on the back of his head, he knew she wasn’t happy but she wasn’t willing to push the subject, and he couldn’t have been more thankful. They’d been through enough to know when the other was deflecting, he supposed she picked up on it all.

Clint finds that he ends up being tugged to the threadbare couch in his living room, pizza boxes toed out of the way until she pulls him into her lap. She pushes him back enough to give them space for Clint to read her lips but close enough to still feel warmth, “We’ll watch one of your stupid shows and eat some pizza. Then we’re going to have to talk to Steve so we can straighten this out, Barton.” She pauses, the muscle in her jaw twitching as she looks him over. “I know you thought were doing the right thing.”

The thing that was frustrating was that he knows he was doing the right thing. Bullies don’t get to ruin peoples lives or kick them out of their homes and while the rest of the Avengers got to play on the battlefield of being literal superheroes, he was just a dude with a bow and a chip on his shoulder. Which left him to look out for the little guys. The families. That one dude who always asked for a picture when he passed him because he thought he looked like that actor. Or that nice pigeon lady.

Natasha leans forward to grab the nearest pizza box and is pleasantly surprised when there’s still a slice left. Clint briefly considers letting her know that its from at least two days ago but then a part of him remembers all of the times they’d forced themselves to eat far older and far worse food and realizes that it really won’t make a difference.

“Thanks, Nat.”

And if they end up watching the entire season of his show while curled up under a well worn fleece blanket, they say nothing about it when they have to talk to Steve the next day.


	2. tony

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to come out and be finished yesterday, but I got drunk and fell out of my chair and tried to order an emu. So it's here today instead.

“I can make you new ones, you know?”

“What?”

“Hearing aids? New ones? Better ones?” Clint looked confused so Tony just gestured to his ears, “That way we don’t have these issues?”

“I can’t hear you!”

He can absolutely, one hundred percent hear Tony Stark due to the fact he currently _did_ have his hearing aids in, however in the middle of the kitchen with half the baby Avengers sitting around seemed the perfect time for convincing Tony otherwise.

“Turn them on!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“You can read lips, Robin Hood!” Which was in fact true, but Clint also knew that Tony had learned sign language while entirely refusing to use it in front of him like some weird power struggle that Clint did not want to back down from. Mostly it just led to situations like this, with Wanda cradling her head in her hands as she muttered something quietly in her native tongue and Peter stopped eating his cereal with the spoon hanging out of his mouth.

All of Clint’s years of training led up to this moment in time, when he could successfully hold a hand to his ear and keep a straight face, “I don’t know what you’re saying, man.” Before looking over to Wanda.

_No._

She was already back in her book as soon as she was done signing as if the battle royale squaring off in front of her wasn’t the most exciting thing to happen within the last week.

“Kid, help me out here -”

“I don’t know, Mr. Stark, maybe he can’t hear you.” The look that silenced Peter was almost enough to slay him entirely, “I-I’m just saying, we don’t know.”

Tony sighed heavily, “We were literally having a conversation for five minutes before he just decided to stop hearing me. He can hear me. See!” Clint knew he’d been made, he could feel the smirk tugging at the corner of his own mouth, “See! He’s smiling, he’s trying not to laugh. He can hear us!”

There was a pause in the room before Tony threw his hands in the air, muttered something about the ridiculousness of it all and walked out of the room, leaving Clint feeling like he finally accomplished something and Peter looking like he was at a friends house whose parents were arguing.

Wanda heaved a sighed, pushed away from the table and knocked her hip against Clint’s as she left the room, “You make it impossible to find quiet, Clint Barton.” Which he couldn’t exactly argue with. He made it impossible to do lots of things, it was kind of his expertise.

Peter’s head was dropped so low, Clint was pretty sure he could see milk on his hairline and decided that it was probably best to cut him a break. “Careful, kid, don’t drown.” It was good to embarrass Tony in front of him anyways, the kid looked up to the asshole way too much to be a good thing.

Overall, Clint was pretty damn proud of what he’d done for the first few hours after it had happened and then by the time he was curled up in bed he’d forgotten about the whole ordeal entirely. Until, of course, the lights came on at three in the morning and he found Tony standing there, staring at him.

“Okay, I genuinely don’t have my aids in.”

_I know_.

Which left them a thoughtful moment where Clint could scramble to his side table and try to find the blasted things so he could put them in and turn them on, adjusting to the sound of it all once more. “Whassup?”

“I fixed your problem.” Tony paused, seemingly thinking of all of the things that could be listed wrong with either of them, “The hearing aid problem. The first and finest in Stark Technology hearing, we can have them permanently installed and you won’t have to worry about batteries or technical issues or-”

“Tony -”

“Really, once I sat down and looked at it, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. Obviously, you need them so why didn’t we make the effort -”

“Stark -”

“- I honestly can’t understand why the One Eye Wonder let you walk around with such outdated technology -”

“Stark!”

“ - and for a literal genius in every sense of the word, such as myself -”

“I don’t want them!” Tony stopped in the middle of his sentence, staring at Clint in confusion, “I don’t want them.”

“I’m sorry, maybe testing them myself was a bad idea and now I’m hearing incorrectly that you _don’t_ want what I just worked so hard on all afternoon.”

“It’s three in the morning, you worked on it all night.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, motherfucking smartass. Let’s go back to that _not wanting what I made_ bit.”

There’s been a few times in his life that Clint has seen Tony look hurt, genuinely hurt, and he was getting scared that this might actually be one of them. “It’s not that I’m not thankful?”

Tony winced, “But you’re not thankful.” Which was, of course, one way to put it.

“You don’t think that none of this has been… offered to me?” And it all had, even when he’d first started with Fury, they’d tried to make it easier on him. Clint sat back down on the edge of the bed, nervously fiddling with the edge of the comforter and the thread that was so quickly becoming loose there. “Well, not the personalized, Stark Tech version. But any of it. Fury tried. Hill tried. Hell, Coulson gave it a shot before deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle.”

There was an anxious energy in the air that Clint wasn’t quite sure what to do with, with Tony shifting his weight from foot to foot and looking somewhere between fight or flight. “It would benefit everyone.”

Clint shrugged, “Yeah, probably. But I’ve lived with it this long, I think I can manage it a bit longer.”

“You don’t have to though. Easy fix. Simple surgery. Hell, I could probably get Strange over here to do it if you want an actual brain surgeon - “

“No, no no. I’m not getting a wizard in my brain. I don’t want anything in my brain. Not again.”

There it was. They stared at each other for a moment, both knowing what it was like to have someone in there and poking around when you never wanted it. Tony sighed, sitting on the bedside him. “I get it. Probably would fry your brain anyway, not capable of holding up to the power of such incredibly technology.”

“You ever consider that maybe I purposefully take the hearing aids out just so I don’t have to listen to you and so you can _know_ I’m not listening to you?”

They locked themselves in a standoff, each staring at the other and waiting for the first to blink. Until the laughs started and Clint knocked his shoulder against Tony’s. “Whatever you say, Barton.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Never forget that Clint Barton was forced to kill people he worked with while cursed by Loki because I never do and it hurts my heart.

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of this, as you may be able to tell, is inspired by Fraction's Hawkeye which is one of my favorite versions of Clint. I haven't really written since I was roleplaying in like 2012, so you're welcome for this garbage pile.
> 
> Thank you for reading and if you feel so inclined feel free to leave comments!


End file.
